A merchant returns home after an absence of two years to find his wife with a newborn son. She explains one snowy day she swallowed a snowflake while thinking about her husband which caused her to conceive. Pretending to believe, he raises the boy with her until he takes the boy on a trip and sells him into slavery. On his return, he explains to his wife that the boy melted in the heat.[3]

The tale appears in Medieval fabliaux,[3] and was used in school exercises of rhetoric.[2] It first appears in the 11th-century Cambridge Songs.[2] A Medieval play about the Virgin Mary has characters disbelieving her story of her pregnancy citing the tale.[2]

It contrasts to Aarne-Thompson type 703*, Snow Maiden, where a child really has a magical snow-related origin.[4]